William ludwell sheppard biography books

If you are familiar with Francis Trevelyan Miller’s Photographic History of the Civil War, you’re aware that wartime photographs were not published until shortly before 1911, when that monumental 10-volume work came out.

That explains why, when in the mid-1880s Richard Watson Gilder and Clarence Clough Buel conceived a multipart series on the war for Century Magazine, they turned to renowned illustrators such as Edwin Forbes, Theodore Davis, the Waud brothers…

…and William L.

Sheppard. 

Born in Richmond in 1833, Sheppard joined the Richmond Howitzers and rose to lieutenant. After the war he resumed his art career, drawing for Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated, and other magazines.

Among other works, his drawings are found in James Longstreet’s From Manassas to Appomattox (1896), Joseph Derry’s Story of the Confederate States (1895), and Carlton McCarthy’s Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 (1882). 

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